My name is Sam and I’m an addict. Even when I’m asleep I’m dreaming of that shiny blue crystal... Specifically, I’m wondering whether I can line it up with another three shiny blue crystals to create a stripey candy to go with my wrapped candy and blast a whole three rows off the board at once clearing that tricky last jelly.

Apologies. I’m not high. I’m talking about Candy Crush Saga. Most of you will probably know what I mean, but in brief: it’s a game played on Facebook, smartphones and tablets that presents you with a board of different, brightly coloured sweeties in a grid. Each move, you can swap the positions of two adjacent sweets. If in so doing you make a row of three, four or five of the same colour, they will vanish with a satisfying pop. On this basic mechanic are endless variations played. I am stuck (mild annoyance) on level 350 (deep shame).

In my twenties and early thirties the games that satisfied my somewhat addictive personality were played on a console — sprawling, immersive first-person shooters or adventure games. But when you acquire young children and a wife who (selfishly!) expects some civil-ised conversation at the end of the day, things change. Even if you own a high-spec PC or console, you seldom have two hours on the trot to play it. There are also those — many but by no means all of them women — who don’t see themselves as gamers and won’t have owned a console in the first place; and there are the young ones, still not quite up to Xbox but easily entranced by a shiny, intuitive iPad game.

It is to people like me, and people like them, that these simple ‘pick-up’ or ‘casual’ games, played for ten minutes here and there on Facebook or a tablet, appeal. They occupy an idle moment on the Tube, or a sneaky five minutes between meetings, or while putting the kettle on. The players split roughly 50/50 between men and women. It is a vast market, hugely outnumbering those who’d self-identify as gamers. And that means there are megabucks to be made — as often as not in increments of 69p. As a result the business model for these games is now coming under scrutiny. Candy Crush, like most others of its type, is a so-called ‘freemium’ game: you can start playing for free but are encouraged to make in-game purchases to speed your progress. With children among the many users of these games (and children have at best a shaky grasp of the difference between 50p and £50), the Office of Fair Trading is now concerned to establish formal guidelines to prevent the manufacturers exploiting the ‘inexperience, vulnerability and credulity’ of their younger users.

There’s no question that, done right, ‘freemium’ works. Candy Crush’s manufacturer is King, a UK-based company with a David-and-Goliath story; in April, it dethroned the once-mighty Zynga as the world’s biggest manufacturer of pick-up games. The casual gaming companies that make it big have more often been scrappy startups than corporate behemoths. King’s ‘games guru’ Tommy Palm, for instance, is regarded as highly unusual in that he wears suits. He was voted ‘Best Dressed Man in Videogames 2012’, a distinction up there with ‘Best Pole Vaulter in the Old Folks’ Home’. One really big game — for Zynga it was Farmville; for Rovio it was Angry Birds — can be the making of these companies; although, of course, their waning can be the breaking of them. On the back of Angry Birds, Rovio, which was started by three students in 2003, went on to become a huge player in the market.

King — biggest of all, just at the moment — is now reported to be preparing for an IPO in the States. It claims its games are played 30 billion times a month, and estimates of the revenues from Candy Crush alone range from about £400,000 to £500,000 per day.

The business model is one of fiendish genius. Why is Candy Crush Saga, in particular, so insanely successful when match-three games have been with us since, well, noughts and crosses? In the first place, it is slick and well designed. It looks and sounds lovely, its difficulty curve is exquisitely calibrated, and it has, like Angry Birds before it, the supreme quality you might call justonemoregoishness, the videogame equivalent of umami.

But it does more than that. It spreads its tentacles on social media and it exploits its umami. Every 20 levels (about a day or two’s play; although if you get stuck, it can be much longer) you’re asked whether you want to get access to the next 20 levels. You can do this either by advertising the game — asking your friends on Facebook to click a button that will gift you the levels — or by paying.

The utter shame and annoyance and anti-kudos of pestering my friends to save me 69p, while at the same time admitting I’m wasting time on Candy Crush Saga, means I fork out every time. As I say, I’m on level 350, which means that I have spent 69p every 20 levels, and 350 divided by... er... times... err… Well, it’s £12 or so, a dribble at a time. When you consider how many people are playing it worldwide that adds up.

There’s another aspect to the ‘freemium’ side of things. You can get through all of the game’s 485 (and rising) levels, with enough luck and perseverance, without using any cheats. But if you want cheats, they’re there to be bought. A few more moves if you’re just nearly there at the end of a level? More lives? A three-use Lollipop Hammer to smash a hard-to-reach square? Yours for a quid or so. Until recently, and to the utter embogglation of the likes of me, there were ‘charms’ (permanent leg-ups that gave you extra lives, or allowed you to cheat once per level) that cost up to £27.99. Not a misprint. These quietly vanished — and in the absence of an official explanation I can only assume that these charms proved resistible enough that King decided the affront they caused was no longer worth the revenue they brought in.

In this, King follows an established model. In its world-conquering predecessor Angry Birds, if you were completely stuck on a level, or just fancied an impromptu pig-pocalypse, you could buy a ‘Mighty Eagle’ — where a bird the size of an imperial battlecruiser would scream down on to the battlefield, squashing everything in sight. Likewise, dullards planting and reaping their crops in Zynga’s eye-wateringly boring Facebook game Farmville could pay real-world money for, I don’t know, a lilac cow or a jazzy farmhouse.

Is that, as some seem to think, an innately evil business model? I can’t really see it. Sure, there’s something slightly insidious about the way you invest in the game bit by bit, and something slightly annoying about the way it pollutes your Facebook feed. But it’s not that hard to resist paying for the cheats. I’ve never felt remotely tempted to buy so much as an extra move, and King boasts that 70 per cent of those on the last level of Candy Crush have got there without paying a penny.

But in any case it’s probably not games such as Candy Crush that are directly in the OFT’s firing line: 90 per cent of its players are over 21. It’ll be those games that are specifically targeted at children and which take what we might call an edgily entrepreneurial approach to the freemium business model: the manu-facturers of a My Little Pony game, for instance, that offers users a virtual ‘mountain of gems’ for £69.99. The OFT’s concern is, quite rightly, to make sure that pre-teen girls not in possession of £69.99 don’t max out their parents’ credit cards buying a Himalaya of gem mountains by accident; and to make sure in-game advertising doesn’t co-opt peer pressure, given how plugged into social media these games now are, to sell real-money extras to kiddies.

Bottom line: one has to be careful with one’s passwords in a ‘freemium’ world. Every few weeks we get a different version of the story about a smart five-year-old who knew his dad’s iTunes password and spent £28,000 buying magic rings, chrome-plated armour or carrot guns for his character in Zog, Scourge of the Undead on the iPad. The lesson there is surely a simple one. Responsible parents who don’t want their houses repossessed over gem mountains and carrot guns should spend more time attending to their children and less time using the iPad as a babysitter while they play Candy Crush Saga. Now, if you’ll excuse me… ES

Freemiums? Forget it

Gaming connoisseur Helen Lewis argues that the best things in life aren't free

Looking at the tiny picture of a centaur, I felt irritated, and empty. This was supposed to be the high point of the iPad city simulator game Pixel People — the big finish. Over the course of several days I’d painstakingly collected gold coins to buy better buildings, and spliced together the genes of a whole town’s-worth of people to create new hybrids. (The centaur was a ‘jockey’ mixed with a ‘mutant’.) I’d become so desperate to finish the game that I had spent £6.99 of actual money to buy its ‘premium currency’, Utopium. That’s right: for the cost of a decent lunch, I had instead bought the right to bypass several hours of boring gameplay and see a tiny picture of a centaur slightly quicker. No wonder I felt stupid.

There are other games, such as the popular Tycoon series, which invites you to manage a virtual nightclub, theme park or pizzeria, that have a different way of getting your dosh. Their core mechanic relies on ‘grunt work’, repeating the same (often very boring) action in order to gain an in-game reward. So you might find yourself mowing grass to earn money to buy the next roller coaster you want. Or you can just pay for the roller coaster with real cash.

The reason that this trend in the mobile games industry worries me is threefold. First, how good is the core experience of a game if you’re tempted to pay real money to skip it? For me, the whole point of a casual game is to find a fun way to pass some time on the bus, not to take on a boring, repetitive job that usually involves little more than tapping the screen at the right time. Second, what kind of sense of achievement do you get from completing a game when you’ve paid effectively to cheat at it? You can buy a doctorate on the internet, but it’s not the same as slogging away for five years and making yourself the master of a subject.

Finally, what incentives are we providing for the games industry when the best way to make a profit is to make products that are deliberately broken and can only be fixed with money? Isn’t it better to pay for a creative work upfront and know exactly what you’re buying? There are some brilliant smartphone and tablet games that don’t require this economic model; for example, the Benedict Cumberbatch-narrated audio adventure The Nightjar, or delicious puzzler The Room.

We’ve been here before with the coin-operated arcade machines of the 1970s and 1980s. And although I enjoyed Street Fighter and Time Crisis, I’d be devastated if we didn’t also have more mature console titles such as BioShock and Limbo, which offer great visuals, varied gameplay or a tightly woven story to keep you interested, rather than relying on an addictive mechanic to keep you forking out. But if you were starting a games studio today, would you rather take big-budget gambles, or pursue the quick-and-dirty freemium model?

And that ultimately is my problem with freemium games. Well, that and the £6.99 I’m never getting back.